The Damascus Document

The Damascus Document is an ancient Hebrew text that is one of the longest, oldest, and most important of the ancient scrolls found near Khirbet (ruins of) Qumran, usually referred to collectively as the Dead Sea Scrolls for the proximity of the Qumran settlement and eleven nearby caves to the Dead Sea. Its oldest parts originate in the mid- to late second century BCE. While the earliest discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls occurred in 1947, the Qumran Damascus Document fragments were discovered in 1952 (but not published in full until 1996), mainly in what is designated as Qumran Cave Four (some ten manuscripts altogether). However, it is unique in that two manuscripts (MS A and MS B) containing parts and variations of the same text were discovered much earlier, in 1896 (and published in 1910), among the discarded texts of the Cairo Geniza, the latter being written in the tenth-eleventh centuries CE. Together, the manuscripts of the Damascus Document, both ancient and medieval, are an invaluable source for understanding many aspects of ancient Jewish (and before that Israelite) history, theology, sectarian ideology, eschatology, liturgy, law, communal leadership, canon formation, and practice. Central to the structure of the overall text, is the intersection of law, both what we would call “biblical” (or biblically derived) and “communal,” and narrative/historical admonitions, perhaps modeled after a similar division the biblical book of Deuteronomy. A suitable characterization of the Damascus Document, to which we will repeatedly return, could be “bringing the Messiah through law.” Because of the longevity of its discovery, translation, publication, and debated interpretation, there is a long history of modern scholarship devoted to this ancient text.

אצחצח דבר גבורות: The Discovery of the Opening Section of Shelomo Suleiman al-Sinjari’s Seder ha-ʿAvodah

This is the first publication of the beginning of one of the sidrei ʿavodah for the Day of Atonement by Shelomo Suleiman al-Sinjari, a prolific Palestinian paytan who lived in the second half of the 9th century. Although well known to researchers, this piyyut was incorrectly attributed to the greatest Palestinian poet: Eleazar b. Qallir. My consultation of a copy of the seder ʿavodah in a Cairo Geniza manuscript and the database of the Ezra Fleischer Geniza Research Project for Hebrew Poetry led to the correct identification of the author of אצחצח דבר גבורות as Shelomo Suleiman. The article contains a critical edition of the beginning of this seder ʿavodah with annotations and variants.

Targumic Parallels to Variant Readings of the Book of Samuel amongst the Cairo Geniza Manuscripts

The Cairo Geniza has yielded 650+ manuscripts (all fragmentary, of course) of the book of Samuel. A survey of those documents reveals a number of places with variant readings, especially when compared to the great medieval codices: Aleppo (A) and St Petersburg (L). The present article demonstrates that many of these variant readings are reflected in Targum Jonathan and in the Peshitta.

The Art of Ambiguity: The Karaites as Portrayed in Judah Halevi's Book of the Kuzari

On the basis of a letter preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Judah Halevi is assumed to have originally composed his influential book of religious thought, the Kuzari, as a polemical response to a Karaite convert. However, he neither perceived nor described the Karaites as heretics. In fact, his depiction of the adherents of this alternative to Rabbanite Judaism and their origins so appealed to the Karaites that some of them believed that the author had been a (crypto-)Karaite himself, and his reconstructions of the movement's history became appropriated as the founding myth of Karaism. This paper attempts to discern Halevi's attitude toward the Karaites, and his perception of their main fault. It also addresses the fundamental question of his purpose in writing the Kuzari.

Introduction

The second chapter elaborate on some methodological aspects of the research such as prosopography, a detailed description of the main sources of this work (the Cairo Geniza and the main Arabic Muslim sources) and research difficulties. Moreover, this chapter includes a brief introduction to the study of medieval Arabic medicine and its practitioners.